The UCI MIND trainee-led organization ReMIND held its annual Emerging Scientists Symposium at the UCI Student Center. This yearly event gives UCI MIND graduate students, medical students, and post-doctoral scholars opportunities to get out of the laboratory to present their work through posters and oral presentations, to network with and learn from each other, and to generally stay excited about research and the progress we are making toward understanding and discovering solutions for Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders (ADRD) research. Congratulations to Zahara Keulen, Dr. Ghazaleh Eskandari-Sedighi, and Dr. Jean Paul Chadarevian on your selection and presentations!
Read more about this important event: https://mind.uci.edu/remind_train/
The Blurton-Jones lab participates in the 2025 12th Annual Stem Cell Science Symposium held in the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center at UCI where Doctoral candidate Zahara Keulen, second-year graduate student Alina Chadarevian, and incoming graduate student Jasmine Nguyen were selected for poster presentations.
Alina Chadarevian presents her poster “Therapeutic Potential of Human Microglial Transplantation for the Treatment of Sanfilippo Syndrome (MPSIIIA)” at the 2024 UC Irvine Institute for Immunology (IFI) Annual Symposium.
Dr. Hayk Davtyan gave a talk and poster ‘Human blood monocytes and iPSC-microglia exhibit differing proteomic, transcriptional and functional properties following engraftment with the adult mammalian brain‘ at the ISSCR 2024 conference in Hamburg Germany.
Joia Capocchi was awarded the James Tait Goodrich Award for excellence in Neurobiology at the 2024 CNLM Awards Ceremony. Joia was also awarded the Barry Goldwater Scholarship at the 2024 Provost luncheon. Congratulations on your outstanding achievements!
Microglia replacement strategies are increasingly being considered for the treatment of primary microgliopathies like adult-onset leukoencephalopathy with axonal spheroids and pigmented glia (ALSP). However, available mouse models fail to recapitulate the diverse neuropathologies and reduced microglia numbers observed in patients. In this study, we generated a xenotolerant mouse model lacking the fms-intronic regulatory element (FIRE) enhancer within Csf1r, which develops nearly all the hallmark pathologies associated with ALSP. Remarkably, transplantation of human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived microglial (iMG) progenitors restores a homeostatic microglial signature and prevents the development of axonal spheroids, white matter abnormalities, reactive astrocytosis, and brain calcifications. Furthermore, transplantation of CRISPR-corrected ALSP-patient-derived iMG reverses pre-existing spheroids, astrogliosis, and calcification pathologies. Together with the accompanying study by Munro and colleagues, our results demonstrate the utility of FIRE mice to model ALSP and provide compelling evidence that iMG transplantation could offer a promising new therapeutic strategy for ALSP and perhaps other microglia-associated neurological disorders.
Dr. Jean Paul Chadarevian and Joia K. Capocchi attend 2024 Keystone Symposia on Neurodegeneration in Santa Fe, NM where Jean Paul presented, “Therapeutic potential of human microglia transplantation in a chimeric model of CSF1R-related leukoencephalopathy“.
Dr. Blurton-Jones (Examining the therapeutic potentical of microglial transplantation in chimeric models of AD and FTD) and Dr. Davtyan (Human Monocytes remain transcrptionally and functionally distinct from microglia despite long-term brain engraftment) presented at the International Society of Molecular Neurodegeneration 2024 conference on aging, immunity, and peripheral factors in neurodegenerative disease in Seoul, Korea.
Congratulations Lauren Le and Jasmine Nguyen on their First Place poster award at the UCI Undergraduate Research Symposium 2024 presenting the interdisciplinary UROP project, “Engineering iPSC-derived Microglia for CNS-Wide Delivery of Disease Modifying Proteins in Alzheimer’s Disease Mice.”
Well done to all MBJ lab participants.
